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LUG Meetings

Meet up with Montana Linux people on IRC. We currently gather at the #ubuntu-montana room on the freenode network. Stop in and say "hello" or even ask/answer some questions. Don't have to be a Ubuntu user either. Or use the web-based chat client.

BillingsLUG
The BillingsLUG hasn't had a meeting in a while but they are hoping to start back up real soon. Really.

BozemanLUG
The BozemanLUG meets on the FIRST Thursday of the month at 7PM

MSU-Bozeman
EPS Building, Rm 259
Bozeman, MT
Used to be the LAST Thursday, but we changed it.

BozemanLUG

It was the best of times,
it was the worst of times,
it was the age of wisdom,
it was the age of foolishness,
it was the epoch of belief,
it was the epoch of incredulity,
it was the season of Light,
it was the season of Darkness,
it was the spring of hope,
it was the winter of despair,

we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way— in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

It is an Ogg Theora .ogv file that I recorded with gtk-recordmydesktop. Right-click and "Save as..." to download. Or if you have a newer version of Firefox with .ogv support, watch it in your browser. The better experience is probably to download it. If your preferred media player can't play .ogv files, I recommend you check out VLC Media Player.

Brian VincentJust wanted to thank Brian Vincent for giving the presentation on Wine. It was very interesting to hear from someone who was a member of the project for several (five?) years.

Brian said he has been working in a Windows only shop and for the presentation he had installed Linux (Fedora 10) on his laptop for the first time in a long while. Glad to see it actually worked well.

It is nice when a presenter uses Linux to give their presentation at a Linux meeting, huh? He actually ran his slides from Powerpoint 2003 under Wine as one of several examples he gave of how well some apps work.

The meeting went well last night but as expected, no one wanted to do any member profile videos... but I did shoot the following video. You should be able to root through our member list and the pictures that are posted and identify most everyone. If you want the high quality Ogg Theora video, right-click and "Save Link As..." the following: bozemanlug-20081204.ogv

My wife is sick and will probably be hospitalized for a few days... so I won't be able to make the meeting tonight... so it has to be canceled. Sorry about the last minute notice but it is the best I could do. See you next month.

Rusty Conover volunteered to give a presentation this month.Here's the title and description he provided:

Using Linux-based Cloud Computing to achieve scalable web hosting

Web sites are becoming bigger users of bandwidth every day so its getting harder to build an infrastructure that is scalable enough to handle serving thousands of visitors in parallel, especially when they all want to stream your videos on their high-bandwidth cable modems.

To do this you're probably going to pay a lot of money for a large internet connection that will sit idle most of the time along with all of the servers you'll need to fill that pipe. It would sure be great to have that infrastructure without having to pay for it, physically build it and then run it. The great thing is you don't have to anymore.

I will explain how I have solved this scaling problem using Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to allow InfoGears to have bandwidth on demand and achieve needed scalability for our applications and client websites without a large effort in a extremely cost effective manner.

I'll explain how to use Apache 2.2, BIND and some Perl to make everything work together and result in a solution that is simple to use, scalable and reliable. So if your interested in how to lower your hosting costs, decrease the load on your web servers or just how to prepare to handle things when your videos go viral this will be a presentation for you.

Wow, that sounds very interesting. Please pass this along to anyone outside of the BozemanLUG who you think might be interested.

Wow, great meeting this evening. Jeffrey Sharkey and Justin Krohn gave a presentation on MythTV and the HDHomeRun networked HD tuner. Ten people turned out for the meeting.

First Jeff gave us the history of MythTV, a feature overview, and then he compared it to other DVR software packages that are available. He explained the frontend software and the backend software... and how they didn't have to be on the same machine. He also discussed the TV listing providers.

Justin showed MythTV in operation (both the fancy GUI frontend and the web-based version) and shared some of his recent recordings made using his HDHomeRun network tuner. He mainly uses his setup with broadcast HD and reviewed all of the sources of HD content available in the Bozeman area. I was surprised at the number and high quality of the broadcast channels available although it was pointed out that one needs a good antenna.

Justin gave a complete overview of the HDHomeRun device, how well it works with MythTV and other software and said that he was very happy with the device.

Justin gave a good overview of all of the related signal types and showed that broadcast HD includes a lot of information embedded within the signal. He had to wonder around the building with his laptop and the HDHomeRun device before he was able to find a good broadcast signal... as the EPS building is pretty good at blocking them. He was able to demonstrate broadcast HDTV on his laptop with VLC and it looked fantastic.

Update: Donnie was able to update the DNS, has taken over DNS hosting... and even set up a mailing list for us. I'm waiting for the DNS to propagate before I add everyone to the mailing list.

Donnie Lunder has made some progress in getting the bozemanlug.org domain out of Ken's name and into a manageable state again... but it isn't completely done. Feel free to do a whois and see what I mean. The primary and secondary DNS still point to that of the hosting provider that Ken was using. Once Donnie has the ability to change the DNS references I believe he will be hosting some new zone records... and then we can make bozemanlug.org point wherever we want.

I made a copy of Ken's bozemanlug.org site and will keep it around for reference. Ken's hosting provider has suspended the account so the site is dead as is the discuss@bozemanlug.org mailing list... which is the main reason for this post.

I'm not sure we need a replacement mailing list... if people will start using this site... but I am open to suggestions. Feel free to comment or email me. My email address and full contact info are in the footer of every page on this site.

Training materials for new users has been a topic of discussion lately... especially with the renewed claim that, "2008 will be the year of the Linux desktop" and the seeming rise of Ubuntu as a distribution for new users.

Judy recently wrote to us:

Learning Linux

I just wanted to thank, I believe it was Scott and Warren for turning me to Chess Griffin's Podacsts. I have listened to the first 12 so far and am understanding more with each one. Sometimes I have to listen to a podcast twice to get it. I am very computer illiterate, however I am beginning to understand some of the jibberish Ken used to talk about. Bodhi is doing an adult education class in January as well. With what I am learning from Chess will help me with that class.

Thanks again for you help and patience,
Judy

You are welcome Judy. Thanks to Charles Griffin for the Linux Reality podcasts. The rest of this posting deals with what training materials are out there and discusses an opportunity for us to give back to the Linux community.

The meeting is tonight. I got a few replies back from people who just wanted to meet at the MSU CS lab rather than the traditional meeting place and driving over.

For anyone who isn't familiar with the MSU CS lab location... and where to park, here's some basic instructions:

The Engineering and Physical Science (EPS) building is located at the corner of W. Grant St. and S. 7th Ave. The building is on the NE corner of the intersection. The place to park is on the SW corner of the intersection. There are several parking lots on S. 7th Ave. but the "Pay lot" is the north most one. That's where you want to park. At the time of the start of the meeting, you'll probably need to pull a ticket when entering the lot (or the arm won't come up to let you in)... but by the end of the meeting, the pay lot is closed and the arm is up so you can exit the lot freely.

The meeting room in the EPS building is on the second floor... room 259. I try to make sure the building is unlocked so no one has any trouble entering.

The topics for tonight's meeting are:

1) Howto record screencasts in Linux

and if anyone is interested

2) Creating and using desktop environments within OpenVZ virtual machines

The method used for remotely using the desktop environments also applies to non-virtualized use so if you'd like to know how to run KDE on a remote machine over ssh with the display coming up on your local machine... without using VNC, I'll show you how. VNC is also usable in both scenerios too.

Despite the poor weather, I hope to see you at the meeting.

Update from the day after the meeting: We had approximately 9 people attend the meeting so it went rather well... although I wasn't as prepared for my two presentations as I would have liked to have been. We also talked a lot about GNOME vs. KDE... did a little Ubuntu and Fedora bashing... talked about the HDHomeRun HD/Digital tuner box with Network output (which we hope to have demoed in Feb 2008)... and Linux in general.